The Mad Video CEO Q&A: Tags Open Video to e-Commerce

“We are seeing that video is becoming a standard of communication on the online channel, where YouTube is becoming a second search engine. The next step is to have access to that in-video content: find people, things, and places in those videos.”

— Koldo Garcia, CEO, The Mad Video

The Internet video advertising space is at a critical changing point, so I sat down for an exclusive interview with The Mad Video CEO, Koldo Garcia, who is also my client, to better understand the online video space. The following is our discussion on how video boosts SEO, the emerging field of video commerce, and what we can expect to see in the online video space in 2014.

1. Could you introduce The Mad Video?

First, The Mad Video is a video tagging engine. Users can use our tags to enrich their video content with relevant information and links. What is most important about The Mad Video, from the point of view of search, is that we open the in-video content to search engines. This is a big change, because until now, video content was locked, where you could not share specific moments or elements within video. Now, with our solution, producers can tag individual elements in their videos, opening content to search and to e-commerce.

2. Video is becoming the medium of choice for social media, content curation, and brand discovery. Why should bloggers do more videos?

One reason is to create a deeper relationship with your followers, because video is more engaging than other content formats. Also, video attracts and retains more visitors to your site, and it can improve your SEO. MarketingSherpa found that video attracts two to three times as many monthly visitors, doubles time on site, and has a 157 percent increase in organic traffic from search engines.

Videos also help you to monetize. It depends on the strategy you are following – whether through brand relationships or affiliate network relationships, but sites with video generate more transactions than sites without them.

3. Can marketing via digital video improve product SEO? How?

Including video improves the SEO of that product page. In addition to that, there are many other videos that might feature your product that are not on your product page. This is where The Mad Video comes in. If you tag products in your videos, our solution automatically creates a separate, product landing page within our platform, which can increase traffic to your product page.

We saw the value of boosting SEO for e-commerce, and designed our video tags with improving SEO in mind. We wanted to make specific elements or moments in video content indexable, searchable, and therefore monetizable.Our tags are also the only ones that allow friends to click to the specific moment in the video where a product appears, rather forcing them to fish around for the exact moment they want. This has great implications for social commerce and opens an entirely new door of video-based advertising.

4. How are consumers reacting to video and video commerce?

Video is becoming one of the most important tools for e-commerce, specifically for generating sales. ComScore, eMarketer and other analysts tell us that sites with video convert better than sites that don’t. Many reports show that. Invodo found that shoppers who viewed video were 174 percent more likely to purchase than viewers who didn’t, and Internet Retailer found that shoppers who viewed video on product pages were 144 percent more likely to add to cart than other shoppers. So we can say with confidence: consumers like video as the medium to discover, evaluate, and purchase products.

5. What predictions would you make for the year ahead for online video?

We’re going to see a high increase in video advertising overall. The ROI of video is higher than for other online formats – it just works better for advertising. We’re currently seeing Facebook, Yahoo!, and others push a lot of video advertising on their channels, and this will only increase. We’ll see marketers experimenting more with Vine and other short-video formats.

We’ve also seen some changes with how video creators use YouTube following the outspokenness of industry watcher, Jason Calacanis, who publicized the platform’s practice of controlling so much of video ad revenue. On the one hand, content creators get great marketing, exposure and distribution, but then on the other hand, YouTube takes about 45 percent of the revenue those videos generate.

Increasingly, video creators are putting their premium content on their own websites or on other platforms, and use YouTube mainly as a storefront. They depend on people finding their content on YouTube, which right now, doesn’t guide viewers directly back to the creator’s website. Will that change? In terms of search results, will Google show the video on YouTube rather than the video on the content creator’s site? I think we’ll see this and its implications for social search evolve in 2014.

Conclusion

Online video is one of, if not the, most successful Internet-based advertising formats. Opening up individual elements or moments within video content would create new online video-based advertising and e-commerce opportunities. As for the fate of YouTube, marketer investment continues to grow, and it will be interesting to see if and how the attitudes of content creators correspond to significant changes in how they use the platform.